Is He Still Talking About Google-ability? He Is.
/The subject of the “google-ability” of tricks has taken over my email box, so I want to do a post on that today and a mailbag post on Wednesday to sort of wind down on the subject for now.
A bunch of people wrote me over the past few days to explain their rationale for why they chose this answer in the survey I ran a week or so ago.
The question was: “When it comes to the google-ability of a trick, which statement best represents your feelings…”
And I wanted to hear more from the people who said,
“As long as they enjoy the trick in the moment, I don’t really care what they search or learn about it afterwards.”
Now, because the categories in my question were broad, I will say that most of the explanations didn’t match up perfectly with what I imagined people selecting that response would be thinking. I was more expecting to hear, “I don’t care if people search out the secrets afterwards because information shouldn’t be kept secret,” or some goofball shit like that.
But I didn’t hear that sort of thing too often. Most of the responses fell into two categories:
1. “I don’t worry about it because of the type of material I perform.” (i.e. tricks from books rather than effects that were marketed individually.) Which doesn’t exactly suggest that they’re ok with people googling, just that they don’t feel it’s an issue for them.
Or
2. “I don’t worry about it because I don’t think people really google tricks.”
I have bad news for you… they do. The big mitigating factor here is age. If you’re performing for an over-50 crowd, primarily, you’ll find less of this. But otherwise, if you present a very clear, direct mystery to people, then there is a very good chance they’ll run it through google.
Tricks People Won’t Google
I think it’s true that there are a good number of tricks that someone would never google.
People don’t bother googling bad or boring tricks.
And they don’t bother googling longer routines where a bunch of stuff happens because:
It might be boring, as just mentioned.
There might be so much going on they wouldn’t know where to start with a google search.
For a lot of longer routines like that, they think they already know how it’s done: “Sleight of hand.”
In our testing, sleight-of-hand (often paired with misdirection) is the most common response people give when asked if they know how a trick is done. They will give that answer as if it’s a full explanation. And they seem content with that answer. The don’t need more information. So in the case that they think what you did was sleight-of-hand, they probably wouldn’t end up googling the trick. In their mind they don’t need to.
It’s like if I asked you, “I wonder how Ted cut these pieces for the construction of the birdhouse?” And you said, “He used woodworking tools.” You don’t actually know the names of the tools or how they work or what they do. But you don’t need to. You have the general idea and that’s enough. You don’t feel a sense of “mystery” in regards to how those pieces got there. You just realize there are some specific details you don’t understand because you’re not immersed in that world.
This is one of the reasons I personally avoid long sleight-of-hand pieces. With rare exceptions, they don’t seem to capture people’s imaginations because they have the Easy Answer of “sleight-of-hand” to fall back on. That’s not a problem if you want people to think of you as a sleight-of-hand technician. But generally I try to avoid being associated with that.
Don’t Fear the Google
Imagine two magicians, Magician A and Magician B, and they have both just performed a trick for some strangers. Magician A’s audience gives a warm response and some puzzled looks before declaring, “I guess it’s magic!” Magician B’s audience gives a warm response and some puzzled looks and, when the magician is gone, they’re on their cell phones trying to figure out how it’s done.
Based just on this information, I would assume that Magician B is the better magician with the stronger trick. We at least know that Magician B’s audience is fooled by the trick and still thinking about it after he left. While it’s true that if you’re a dick people might want to undermine what you did and search for an answer, they will usually have that impulse too even if they adore you. So we can’t say anything about the power of B’s performance skills one way or the other.
An important realization for me about audience reactions was this: Wanting to know the answer is part of being mystified. You can entertain people or fool people, and maybe they won’t make an effort to discover the secret. But to be mystified, they have to have some desire to know what really happened. That desire to know is inherent in the feeling of mystery. You don’t know your mailman’s mom’s maiden name. But you have no desire to know it, so it’s not a mystery. But if I say, “I can’t tell you… but you would never believe what your mailman’s mom’s maiden name is. Oh my god….” All of a sudden, it’s a mystery. The only thing that changed was your desire to know the information. If you’re reading a mystery book and you don’t care about finding out what happened, then you’re not really reading a mystery book. You’re just reading an account of someone who was bludgeoned with a statuette in the grand foyer of Tuttlesworth Manor in Shropshire.
So instilling that desire to know the secret is not a fault in your attempt to generate mystery. It’s exactly what one would expect from a successful performance.
The Power of Charm
Now, it’s also true that people can be so charmed and delighted by a trick that they have no interest in googling it. But this is much more rare and requires a pretty special presentation. A lot of magicians delude themselves into thinking they’re such brilliant performers and that’s why no one ever googles a trick or no one ever asks to see the deck or whatever. Nope. 1000 to 1 the odds are that they just didn’t care that much about what you showed them.
Not wanting to seek out the answer is usually a learned response for people. Their natural inclination is to figure it out. But if you’re good, over time, they may come to value the experience of just being overwhelmed by the magical encounter.
One of the ways of identifying someone with that mindset is if they’re seeking out a performance from you. The person who goes to Copperfield to be amazed is going to have a different appreciation for being fooled than the person who has a trick sprung on them by an acquaintance.
As an amateur you can plant the seeds with quick, lower-stakes tricks and then cultivate an audience with the people who come back and ask for more and seem to enjoy the wonder of the moment. The people who seek this sort of thing out tend to be he people who are more easily charmed by the magical experience and see the value of an unanswered mystery
The Power of Presentation
A good presentation can positively affect the google situation as well.
First, a good presentation can add to the charm factor to make the spectator not want to undermine what just occurred.
But more importantly, a good presentation can just disrupt the logic flow in a person’s mind so searching for the answer isn’t the sole, obvious next step.
If I’m showing you the color-changing knives and my presentation is, “Watch, I’m going to make this knife change color,” and you’re fooled, there isn’t much for you to think of or do afterwards other than say to yourself, “Hmmm… I wonder if I can figure out how that was done. Let’s see. “ [Typing] knife change color magic. “Okay, well, here we go.”
A straightforward trick with no presentation to speak of doesn’t give the spectator many options other than trying to figure the trick out. It’s like giving them a button and saying, “Don’t press the button.” Well… what else is there to do?
But if your presentation wraps the spectator in a story then you can give them much more to occupy their thoughts with other than just, “What’s the secret?” If a knife changes color and your presentation is about hypnotizing them to see the different color or transferring objects through mirror dimensions that are the inverse of ours, then at least there is something more to consider at the end of the effect. Regardless of their belief-level in the presentation itself. They don’t have to believe you’re swapping items between dimensions to imagine the ramification of the idea.
Sometimes a presentation will completely camouflage the effect, making it ungoogleable by causing them to google something else entirely.
Sometimes a presentation can occupy their thoughts enough that they don’t immediately think to google the trick at the heart of the presentation.
But even with a commercially available, easily figured out effect like the color-changing-knives, a strong presentation can maintain some of the value of the encounter even if the trick is figured out. In the same way a mystery novel can still be a good read if the ending was spoiled for you by someone—so long as the rest of the book is written artfully. I still tend to avoid such tricks, but there’s no doubt a great presentation can salvage them to a certain extent.
Revising Vernon
Vernon said that a good effect is one that can be described in a single sentence. That statement was accurate 50 years ago or whenever he uttered it. But it’s not as true today. The tricks that can be described so simply can also be searched so simply. So I guess it still describes a good effect in theory, but not necessarily a good one to perform.
I would say a good trick is one that seems to the audience like it should be google-able, but when searched, it produces no informative results. Similar to Vernon’s definition, I believe the best effects are ones that an audience could describe in one sentence. But in this modern day, that simple description should lead to no answers.